A recent study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that even though most Americans have at least one financial product — checking accounts, credit cards, loans, investment accounts — that use forced arbitration clauses to strip the account-holder of their right to sue, very few of us know about these restrictions or understand what they mean. Read More ›

Very few lawyers will take on a single consumer’s arbitration dispute because it’s not worth their time. Some arbitration clauses also force the customer into arbitrating their case in a specific venue, so you could have to travel all the way across the country for the possibility of minimal rewards. Arbitration also sets no legal precedent, so even if one customer prevails, another customer might fail using the exact same evidence. Read More ›

The state Senate Judiciary Committee [voted] Tuesday on a bill designed to give surviving spouses, domestic partners and children the same protections borrowers have in the Homeowner Bill of Rights, including the right to sue to stop a foreclosure or for economic damages after one occurs. The bill, SB-1150 … would prevent servicers from moving forward with a foreclosure before requesting “reasonable” documentation of the borrower’s death and the identity of the survivor. Read More ›

Half of online payday loan borrowers incur an average of $185 in bank penalties because at least one debit attempt by lenders creates an overdraft or fails completely. … In addition to simply extracting money from borrowers’ accounts when payments are due, [the online system] allows lenders to attempt multiple debit transactions against borrowers’ accounts when the first attempt fails. Nearly 18% of borrowers experience multiple failed requests on the same day from the same lender. For an already financially strapped borrower, this can lead to hundreds of dollars’ worth of overdraft fees. Read More ›

In 2010, the judge in the case ordered the bank to pay the $203 million to customers of Wells Fargo who were affected by the overdraft policy between Nov. 2004 and June 2008. … At issue in the appeal to the Supreme Court was whether or not previous courts were right to certify the class action even though the class included individuals who were not harmed by the company’s conduct — in this case Wells Fargo allegedly making misleading statements to checking account customers about how their transactions would be posted and the likelihood that an overdraft would result. Read More ›

Both the state Department of Business Oversight and the [U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] have turned their attention to so-called marketplace or peer-to-peer lenders — online firms that offer loans to consumers and small businesses, then sell those loans to investors. There are now dozens of such lenders, which use online applications and speedy underwriting systems to issue loans. … That growth has attracted the attention of consumer advocates, who are concerned about how lenders protect customer data and whether they comply with state and federal lending laws. Read More ›

The nation’s big consumer banks collected about $11 billion in overdraft fees last year, which accounted for 8 percent of their profits, according to a report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. … Many customers end up confused by how overdrafts work. In their marketing materials, for example, banks present the choice of whether to sign up for overdraft as an offer of “overdraft protection” — a feature many customers thought would automatically deny transactions and shield them from incurring the fees at all. In reality, it is a service authorizing the banks to charge the overdraft fees. Read More ›

There were 12.7 million adult victims of identity theft nationwide in 2014, including over 1.5 million in California, according to the California Attorney General’s Office. “My educated guess is that nearly every adult in the U.S. has been affected by at least one breach involving their Social Security number and/or sensitive personal financial information. Most people have likely been affected by more than one breach,” said Beth Givens, Executive Director of the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Givens predicts health care institution breaches will continue to be big stories in 2016. Other likely targets are educational institutions and government agencies. Read More ›

If approved by a federal judge, the settlement would close the books on a 2012 lawsuit that the government filed against the bank over bad loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration. … Between 2001 and 2005, prosecutors said, the bank issued thousands of FHA loans that did not meet the program’s requirements, which include minimum incomes and credit scores for borrowers. They also said that from 2002 to 2010, the bank violated federal reporting requirements by keeping problem loans under wraps and collecting insurance payouts when loans went bad. Read More ›